Hello Citizens and Civilians, and welcome to our new blog version of Nuggets for Nuggets! As well as giving you new, exciting, bite-sized tidbits of information during the show, we thought we’d post them all here for your viewing pleasure!

Ship to Ship Damage

There are a lot of things a spaceman never wants to hear. Things such as “Wait, was it second star to the right?” and “Geoff, are you going to eat the rest of your cheeseburger”, but above all of that what they especially don’t want to hear is “So, am I supposed to be able to see the stars from the cargo bay?”. Unfortunately, if you like to live life on the edge of the deep black, this could be a situation you find yourself in on more than one occasion.

The finer details of the damage system are a little unknown at this point, but one thing that we do know for certain is that you’re going to be able to mitigate it as much as possible. Of course, they say the best defence is a good offence, but what about when the other person’s weapon is just slighter bigger than yours? Well, you’d best hope that you invested a lot of credits in your shields.

Shields have different ratings. We’ve seen them from a rating of ‘2’ all the way up to ‘8’. We have no idea how that compares, but what we do know is that bigger is better! Not every ship will be able to equip every shield-type out there, but through the use of upgrade points and clever power management, you will be able to raise a bubble of energy so impregnable, not even Benedict Cumberbatch – in a leopard print thong! – would reach the target. Sorta. Kinda. Shields are, after all, energy and energy can be depleted.

Shields will have “zones”, so if you take too much damage to one facing, you’ll find yourself being worn a bit thin. Repositioning your craft to take damage to another facing will help mitigate as much damage as possible, but as they say, all good things must come to an end, and eventually your shields will run out of power.

So what happens when you’re out of shields, or were ambushed and didn’t have time to raise your shields? Well things just got a whole lot more interesting for you. In Star Citizen, each ship has individual damage maps that go from pristine through badly charred to non-existant for pretty much every single element on the ship. If you take a couple of strong hits to your wing, you can kiss it goodbye — and not just cosmetically — your handling, turn rate and if you had a wing-mounted arsenal, well those will all take a hit or simply be unavailable.

This then opens up a whole series of extra fun-and-games that can be had when pirating, or defending yourself from the pirates. Want to claim that fancy looking Freelancer as your own? No problem! Simply target their engines, destroy them, and once you’ve killed the occupants tow it back to your area of space — yes, you’ll be able to take out individual parts of a ship rather than just targetting the ship as a whole (like in a traditional MMO), however this brings a certain level of player-based skill — you’d better hope that you’re as much of a crack shot as you think you are if you only want to hit their engines and nothing else.

So, what’s in a name? Well a ‘nugget’, as well as being a small, bite-sized piece of information is also the name for a trainee pilot. Nuggets for Nuggets is a weekly section of the show where we delve into the mechanics of Star Citizen and give you the gory details from the inside out. As the game is still in active development, all the information given is subject to change but we will revisit sections in the future to bring you up to speed.